Title: Not Okay
Rating: T
Fandom: Rizzoli & Isles
Pairing: Jane/Maura
Summary: for some reason, she can’t get the image of the blood blooming across Jane’s body.
Notes: 657. Post season one finale.
Maura is used to blood. Can identify it anywhere, even if she would never commit to calling it blood. She knows the colour, the smell, the taste of it. She knows how it flows in the body and how it flows out of the body. She knows the way it moves, pools, oxidises, changes.
Maura is used to blood. It doesn’t bother her.
But for some reason, she can’t get the image of the blood blooming across Jane’s body, through the light grey marl of her t-shirt. The way it covers her entire torso, drips down and merges into the black of her trousers.
The way it pushed through Maura’s fingers as she tried to stem the bleeding.
She thinks about it a lot. Even as Jane heals, Maura feels injured still, as if her own body was hurt and it weighs on her. She is going through the motions as Jane lies in the hospital bed, even flirting with the surgeon feels empty, pointless. It’s just part of what she should do. She should carry on as expected, work, Jane, flirt, Jane, sleep, Jane.
If only it felt better. If she felt something.
Something other than horror.
Every time she looks at her own hands all she can see is red, red, red.
She finally cracks when Jane takes her hand one day in the hospital.
She’s having her stitches checked by a nurse and it hurts; Maura can see it in the right rein the other woman has of her reaction. Maura knows her, and she knows it hurts because when it’s just the two of them, Jane admits it. Shows she’s hurting. But for her family, her doctors, her friends, she’s forcing a façade that fools no one. Her facial muscles tense, fingers clenching against the white of the hospital sheets. The way she lets out a barely noticeable hiss but reaches out for Maura grabs her hand and squeezes.
Maura somehow manages to keep herself in check until the nurse leaves, before a sob escapes her.
“Hey,” Jane pulls her closer, and the bed rail digs into her side but she can stand it if it means being closer to her best friend. “Maura, what’s wrong?”
She’s embarrassed. By her outburst, by her inability to handle a little (a lot) of blood, by the way Jane is having to be strong because Maura’s too weak.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay.”
“No, it’s not,” she says between gulping gasps of breath and sobs. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“About what?” Jane asks as if she didn’t shoot herself in the abdomen a week prior.
“I thought you were going to die,” Maura sobs. “And I can’t stop thinking about it.”
With a grunt, Jane lowers the rail and pulls Maura closer. She hisses even as she wraps her other arm around the blonde but doesn’t stop until Maura gives in and climbs onto the bed and moulds her body to Janrs. She can’t stop crying, even as her friend holds her and shushes her and kisses the top of her head.
“It’s okay Maur, I’m okay,” Jane murmurs into her hair and it’s a long time before Maura calms. She can accept that Jane is alive but she is not okay.
They are not okay.
When she thinks she can talk again, without crying, she shifts – carefully – up the bed, so their faces are next to each other. Without really thinking, she kisses Jane on the cheek, enjoys the soft bloom of a blush over her cheek, and thinks about how she prefers that image to her nightmares of blood.
“You’re not okay,” she tells her softly.
Jane smiles and kisses Maura back, close, closer, to her lips, but far enough away that Maura thinks it’s just a slip, just their positions, just the way they’re fragile and pressed together and tired.
“I will be though,” Jane says. “As long as I’ve got you.”